Updike Takes Mighty Pen To Artwork

Who could resist an invitation from John Updike to go picture-hopping? Or, for that matter, even pub-crawling?

Almost any experience refracted through the well-informed, opinionated prism of this brilliant, witty wordsmith is bound to be memorable.

And art is no exception. John Updike is an amateur artist talented enough to be a professional. After Harvard, he spent a year at Oxford at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. And we know, from autobiographical allusions in some of his 32 books, that at one youthful point it was a toss-up which field he would chose.

It is not surprising, therefore, that in this book of artistic wandering, there is a chapter entitled "What MoMA Done Tole Me." Nostalgically celebrating 40 years of visitations to the remarkable Museum of Modern Art, Updike waltzes us by his favorites. (Like others, this article on New York's Museum of Modern Art is a magazine reprint.) Recapitulating his adolescent reactions, he observes the "ardor" of Cezanne, the "freedom and impudence" of Braque, the "icy-creamy colors and fat, satisfied black outlines" of Picasso's "Girl before a Mirror."

There is also, to my especial delight, a chapter on Vermeer, "the best . . . (of whose paintings) are perhaps the loveliest objects that exist on canvas." Updike it seems - even as you and I - was once determined to see every Vermeer available to public scrutiny. (Not altogether a sappy ambition; there are only some 40 existent.) Here, however, he zeroes in on a rare Vermeer (in size and landscape subject) "View of Delft" hanging in the wonderfully atmospheric, if dimly lit Mauritshuis in the Hague (Holland).

Updike, who is a kicky, off-center conservative in the Tom Wolfe mold, includes cartoons and manuscripts in this art review. In "The Child Within" he displays an example of Beatrix Potter's "exquisite little watercolors" (a recumbent Peter Rabbit,) a spooky John Tenniel ink drawing from "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" (nothing in my childhood was more terrifying) and quotes John Ruskin on Kate Greenaway; "In her drawings you have the radiance and innocence of reinstated infant divinity.."

Typically kind, in "Something Missing," Updike, nevertheless, gently joins in the now-fashionable artistic bashing of the then-fashionable, Belle Epoque artist John Singer Sargent. His assessment of the "missing;" a lack of "an at-ease emotional possession of the subject." It is a charge that, more often than not, is belied by the luscious portraits chosen to accompany the text.

On the other hand, Updike charts his own course in defending the work of his own disparaged fellow Pennsylvanian Andrew Wyeth in "Heavily Hyped Helga." With wicked, withering wit, he dismisses the titillation that threatened to overwhelm Wyeth's 1987 show at the National Gallery: "The global excitement could be generated by the dim possibility that an aging artist had slept with his middle-aged model . . . testifies . . . to the lowered sexual expectations of the AIDS era."

Since this is non-fiction, one might expect to be spared, what for some of us is Updike's occasional fictional overkill: Scatological detail. And so we are. There is nothing remotely as aesthetically off-putting as, say, Robert Mapplethorpe's homoeroticism. Still, Updike's enthusiasm for French sculptor Jean Ipousteguy's graphic "La Naissance" (the birth) with its none-too-subtle chauvinistic condescension, escapes me.

In general, however, "Just Looking" is a beautiful, to-be-forever-treasured art book featuring carefully selected reproductions and original opinions from a man whose opinions count.